Sharing my flying stories…

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It was not easy, but it was worth it! Lots of of late nights, early mornings, lots of stress and no social life… But I’ve managed to reach my personal goal and proved myself that anything you can imagine is possible.

Now I can call myself a commercial pilot! 👨🏻‍✈️💪🏼

Many thanks to all of you and the whole universe for all the support and to help me to achieve this! 👨🏻‍✈️😊🙌🍀

So the journey continues. Reaching some 3.000 feet I’ve turned on the autopilot and became (what I was learning about) a “pilot monitoring”. Monitoring the Garmin 1000, which is absolutely great. At the beginning it looked so complicated to me as I was used to fly the old steam gauges PA28 and now on every flight I’m discovering more and more about this fantastic tool. And if 2 screens are not enough, you can mount as me the Ipad as well. I had all my Jeppesen charts on it and also as mentioned the Foreflight app just to double check that we were on track :-D.

Views shortly after take off from Jerez de La Frontera

First leg took us in total 3:40 hours; flying IFR route. Good visibility and weather made us company down to Essaouira, where it was a bit windy (surface wind 010/26 G30), so landing on a RWY34 we had 13kts crosswind from the right.

Here are some imagines from the first leg of the journey:

Barbate y Zahara de los Atunes – Under the clouds ends the european continent

Faro de Trafalgar en Conil de la Frontera. More to the left would be Portugal. Now we have left the european continet

As the caption says: always good to have an flight engineer on board! 🙂

On our way to Essaouira

Moroccan coast

The crew 😀

Casablanca

Autopilot ON. Time to think and enjoy the views 🙂

Mosquée Hassan II, Casablanca

Casablanca

Casablanca airport

Shortly after Casablanca

Simply no words needed

Above the clouds

Preparing the approach

Essaouira

Starting our descent into Essaouira

Barrage Zerrar Damm

Final RWY 34

We made it to Essaouira!

It’s difficult to chose from so many images I’ve made on this trip. The staff at the airport was very friendly, we have ordered something to eat and also delicious moroccan tea!

The good news was that there is free Wifi available at Essaouira Airport :-D.

Free Wifi at Essaouira airport

Our late lunch:

After a quick “pit stop”, emptying our “tanks” after almost 4 hours, refueling the plane, filing a new flight plan, paying the taxes (around 15€), we were ready to go as number too. It could have taken less, but just after us a Transavia’s 737 landed and was serviced first. So we had to wait again… 😀

Transavia’s Boeing 737

The fuel track is finally here!!!

Ready to go

Next almost 2 hours were just above the sea. Sometimes when you think it’s a strange feeling if you see on the Garmin that the nearest airport is either 100NM ahead of behind you…

Above Lanzarote

Canaries were covered by clouds. Later we were flying more into sunset.

Reaching Gran Canaria at sunset

Reaching Gran Canaria at sunset

After flight the approach for RWY 03L we were welcomed by the usual “northwind” (360/20G30).

Fighting some crosswind on final RWY 03L into Gran Canaria (W 360/20 G30)

Mission completed

Mission completed. Happy with the experience and with the flight. Could take off again for another ferry flight! Searching a ferry pilot anyone? 😀

Earlier this week I was lucky to ferry my schools plane (Diamond DA40, reg. EC-MHQ) from Spain’s mainland down to Gran Canaria.

Something that has been on my “To-Do List” for a long time: to fly a plane from the mainland Spain to the Canaries (the other way up would be great as well) and was able to brake some of my personal records:
I flew 800NM just in one day and logged 7 hours of flight!

With our technical stop in Essaouira, for me this was the 3rd time to visit Morocco and the african continent; and the 3rd visit by a plane and flown by myself.

Here is the story. To not to make it too long, I’ll split in 2.

We have arrived on Sunday at Jerez de la Frontera, and we had practically the whole afternoon available to do “something”. So we went to see Moto GP at Circuito de Jerez. I’m not a huge fan of motorcycles, but the circuit is famous, so if we are there, why not to experience it?

Moto GP Jerez 2019

After Moto GP was finished, we went to Jerez de la Frontera city, walked a bit around and ate something. Most of the bars and restaurants were closed on Sunday; maybe we should have went to the beach instead :-).

But the City is nice anyway…

Plaza del Caballo Jerez de la Frontera

In the evening we have visited Gibraltar, I simply had to cross the runway be feet.

About to cross the RWY at Gibraltar airport

Gibraltar airport at sunset

On Monday morning we were ready to start the adventure. Well, at least for me it was the first time to do such a long flight and I was really looking forward to it…

Recently I’ve purchased a new app for navigation called Foreflight; I’m still discovering all its functionalities but it was a great help with the planning of the route.

Literally by selecting the departure and arrival airport I was able to get the IFR route for our flight with the complete briefing (MET, TAF, NOTAM, METEO, WINDS, etc…). Of course I did my planning in advance and printed all the necessary Jeppesen charts needed for the route.

Foreflight’s taxi diagram helps to improve the situational awarness on the ground, specially on an airport you have visited for the very first time and makes taxying much easier. I was really nicely surprised how it worked.

Now back again to our trip.

Actually I’ve learned, that a ferry flight is a mission. A mission to get the plane from A to B. First there is the planning and the expectations, and on the other side there is the reality (with its complications)…

You expect to depart at 10am, but actually you depart 2 hours later… Waiting for refueling, paperwork issues, troubleshooting, etc etc. I can imagine that the “ferry flying” is a lot of action and asks a lot of flexibility, creativity and pacience. But it’s also fun, when the mission was a success.

So let’s begin.
Our plane was stored in a hangar, so the expectation was to find a clean and shiny plane, but not surprisingly the reality was different; there were a lot of birds inside the hangar, so our plane literally looked like a piece of s**t…

Our plane was full of bird s**t…

We got the plane out and had to wash the wings, canopy and windshield before starting the journey. On the other side I was happy to have a clean windshield… 😀

And the plane is clean again…

Then we needed to refuel… After waiting a little bit, finally the fuel track appeared on our place. Happy! He takes the fuel cap off, starts (almost) to pump the fuel and then suddenly receives a call from his office to not to refuel… Despite of asking him to wait, to call the office, and ask what’s wrong, he says: I’m gone… And he was gone…

Seems there was some misunderstanding in the office and they were not sure how to charge the fuel so they just called him and cancelled on this strange manner the refueling process.

Phoned the office and cleared the misunderstanding. After the phone call, 10 minutes later the fuel track appeared again… Lucky enough it didn’t take too long. And this time filling our wing tanks with JET-A1.

Ready? Nooo… As we have planned a technical stop in Morocco, which means that we were about to leave the European Community, we had to get out of the airport again, get a handling company and pass the passport control to be able to depart.

In the meantime, we were also asked to do some modifications in our flight plane (to put our names in it), which I was able to do on my Ipad. Called the operations, got the confirmation of the changes and was looking forward to meet our handling agent (Iberia). They have prepared all the necessary paperwork for us (for around 13€) and we were ready to pass the security control.

Again one step closer. But there was still one more thing pending: the customs… They were expecting us earlier at the check point, but as we didn’t arrive, they were gone… So we had to find them back first, and wait again.After passing the control we were finally able to get into handling agent’s car which brought us finally to the plane.

Waiting for the customs

Now we are ready to go!

Preflight done, jumped in, got the taxi authorization and let’s go…

Taxying and reading the checklist

Holding short of RWY 02

After the departure, we were cleared to fly direct to VJF and the finally the journey had began.

Approximately 2 years ago I was approached by author of this book, John Nowell, with his idea to work together and to include some of my aerial images of the Canary Islands in his project enhancing them with interesting facts from the history of the islands.

Despite being very busy with my job, family and my studies towards the commercial pilots licence, I was not able to say ‘no’ and its result now is an interesting book with my name on it! John is a retired RAF helicopter pilot and author of 16 books in the “A Day Above” and “Now & Then” series. Some of his books have been reprinted up to 14 times!!!

I’m delighted to have joined the team of this interesting project and finally see some of my aerial images in a printed version produced in very highest quality. I think that I personally wouldn’t have the same patience and persistence to ‘write’ a photographic book like this one. I am particularly impressed by the way that John has ‘told’ the visual story through the book from dawn to dusk. This method has allowed him to shift effortlessly from one subject island to another with interesting text to support the photographs.

Hard copy of John’s book “A Day Above The Canary Islands” is available now on amazon.co.uk in the case you’d like to own one – my copy has got its privileged place in my house! Soon the book will be available in public bookshops across the Canary Islands. If you would like a signed and dedicated copy to someone special (such as your father) send an email to John at zodiacpublishinguk@gmail.com and he will arrange it!

Currently (on the 31st May 2019), the book is available in the following shops across Tenerife:

I’m really pleased to be the winner of the National Geographic Spain’s Christmas photography competition, which took place last month on instagram.

All you had to do was a take Christmas picture, post it on instagram, follow National Geographic Spain, use hashtag #NatGeoXmasCollection18 and sit and wait… 😀

In total approximately 1800 images have been posted and mine was selected as winner. Obviously I’m happy as on the top of that I’ve won a new action cam from National Geographic… So the hasthatgs can sometimes be very useful… 🙂

And however it’s already after Christmas, I’m going to share this image with you. It’s called “Santa’s arrival into Tenerife”